Taylor Swift reignited her 14-year feud with Kanye West in her Time Person of the Year interview and she pulled his ex-wife Kim Kardashian back into the fray. Now, the pop superstar’s fans are launching a familiar social media campaign against its originator.
The “Anti-Hero” singer called the venomous rivalry, which came to a head in 2016, a “fully manufactured frame job” and inadvertently rallied Swifties to exact revenge — or a digital version of it — on Kardashian’s Instagram account over the last few days.
Back in 2016, Ye released “Famous,” a song that included vulgar lyrics about Swift that Kardashian claimed the singer had approved. When Swift denied Kardashian’s allegations, the reality star released footage of a conversation between the Grammy Award winners in which Swift seemingly gave Ye her blessing to rap the lyric, “I feel like me and Taylor might still have sex.”
Hours before she released the footage, Kardashian tweeted, “Wait it’s legit National Snake Day?!?!?They have holidays for everybody, I mean everything these days!” followed by a string of snake emojis.
Soon, the emojis spawned all over Swift’s social pages, signifying her apparent fall from grace. (But as this year and the years preceding it have proved, it was a short fall.)
By 2020, the full phone call was shared online, revealing Swift had never approved the specific lyric she took issue with: “I made that b— famous.” Ye’s loaded line referenced the 2009 MTV Video Music Awards, when the hip-hop star rushed the stage to interrupt Swift’s acceptance speech and declare that the female video of the year award should have gone to Beyoncé‘s “Single Ladies (Put a Ring on It)” instead of “You Belong With Me.”
After an initial apology tour, Ye changed his tune at the release party for his album, “My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy” in November 2014, accusing Swift of victimizing herself for fame.
“Taylor never came to my defense in any interview and rode the wave and rode it and rode it,” he said.
Nearly two years later, when Kardashian released the infamous phone-call footage, Swift asserted that her continued entanglement in the controversy was against her will.
“Being falsely painted as a liar when I was never given the full story or played any part of the song is character assassination. I would very much like to be excluded from this narrative, one that I have never asked to be a part of, since 2009,” she wrote in a now-deleted Instagram post.
In 2017, Swift released her “Reputation” album, whose themes touched on her brewing conflict with Ye. In the music video for “Look What You Made Me Do” — the album’s first single — she pokes fun at her 2016 statement. The album, as a whole, oscillates between taking digs at West and laughing it all off, and snake iconography is sprinkled throughout.
In her Dec. 6 interview with Time, the “Eras” concert film star rehashed the saga, but less in jest.
“Make no mistake — my career was taken away from me,” she said, calling West and Kardashian’s effort a “fully manufactured frame job.”
“[It was] an illegally recorded phone call, which Kim Kardashian edited and then put out to say to everyone that I was a liar,” she said. “That took me down psychologically to a place I’ve never been before. I moved to a foreign country. I didn’t leave a rental house for a year. I was afraid to get on phone calls. I pushed away most people in my life because I didn’t trust anyone anymore. I went down really, really hard.
“I thought that moment of backlash was going to define me negatively for the rest of my life,” she added.
After the interview was published, Swift fans rushed to Kardashian’s social media pages, leaving their own trails of snake emojis to slither through the comments sections. They also demanded that the beauty mogul apologize to Swift.
“For everyone saying fans/swifties are being petty and dramatic. This is exactly what they did to her except 10 times worse. They were all in on it,” said the top comment on Kardashian’s latest photo, published Thursday. .
“The swifties are coming for BLOOD,” a user wrote on a Skims post Kardashian shared Wednesday.
Other Swift fans suggested that such retribution is not what the “Cruel Summer” singer would have wanted.
“Tell me you were not here for the original rep era without telling me you weren’t here,” one X user wrote, quoting a post showing a sample of negative comments on Kardashian’s Instagram.
Kardashian and West have yet to address the situation.
However, TMZ reported Thursday that although Swift still feels the ex-couple were in the wrong, she would forgive Kardashian “under one specific condition”: that her apology be public.
“The Kardashians” star, who doubled down on her position even after the full, unedited version of their call was published, maintains that Swift’s prior knowledge about the song vindicated her and Ye. She still has yet to reach out to Swift, even after the Time interview, TMZ said.
